Manny Machado made headlines last week for his so-called anti-analytics. This would have been a big deal 10 or 15 years ago, when front offices still had to deal with empirical research as part of player evaluation and development, but that battle is over now. Bathrooms are available.
Machado said the game is getting harder and harder to play, and that there are “too many stats out there. Too many stats, too many numbers. I don’t even know half of what’s going on there. I look at the board sometimes, and I even ask some guys, like, ‘What is WCCVBB, whatever it is?’… It’s crazy to keep up.”
As someone who makes a living using WCCVBB, I think Machado got the point here. I’m an analyst with a background in sociology: There isn’t a statistic so shocking that I won’t throw it out to see if it will teach me – or better yet, you, the fans – something new about the game.
Machado’s job isn’t to walk into a lab and find new information using bat tracking data. His job is to hit the ball and catch the ball. No matter how useful a new grain soup might be to me, it’s useless to him if he can’t use it to help him hit better. And after 15 seasons of Hall of Fame quality performance, I trust Machado to know the level of knowledge he needs to do his job well.
Reading Machado’s words fully, he was not making a broad, principled statement about the place of empirics in baseball coaching. He acknowledged how much the game has changed during his tenure, but also criticized the media for being negative. The Padres had just lost, and they weren’t playing well, and he was upset.
Besides, baseball fans who count don’t need Machado to have a good relationship with statistics. They need him to hit. Which he is not. Which is really a problem.
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And it’s new. Since making his major league debut in 2012, Machado has had one of the highest floors in baseball. He entered this season on a streak of 13 straight seasons with at least 250 plate appearances and a wRC+ of 100 or higher. Only Freddie Freeman can beat that claim. (Bryce Harper would, too, but he missed the cut by six plate appearances in 2020, so I’m inclined to give him the beans on this fun fact, too.)
Machado has had some tough times, along with his injuries, but he’s never been bad before. His only full season below 2.5 WAR was 2017, when he hit 33 home runs in 156 games, but his defensive metrics at third base dipped from excellent to below average in one season.
This year is different. Through 65 games, Machado has a wRC+ of 68. To put that into classic baseball stats, he’s hitting .172/.253/.345, and is hitting the highest rate of his career. (IK% is under the “advanced” tab on our math pages, but kids learn percentages in elementary school, so how advanced can it really be?)
Whether Machado was bad is not an interesting question for me. We can say that this is the case using the statistics we had in the 1950s. I want to know how it happened. Specifically, I want to know if it will continue to happen. We see the big, right-wing hitters fall off the cliff all the time. Bat speed starts to go off, and it can compensate for a while, then it falls off in a season or two. The Padres, who signed Machado in 2033 with an AAV of $31.8 million, are likely also interested in the question.
There’s some good news right off the proverbial bat: It looks like Machado has real good batting luck. This is a hitter with a career .295 BABIP, who is BABIPing .176 this year. Some of that is his fault, but unless he has forgotten which end of the bat he is supposed to hold, he is also unlucky.
On the part that is his fault. Machado has lost 55 wRC+ points from last year to this year, and the wrath of the BABIP gods can’t explain it all. In this graph, you can see that while he performed well below his expected statistics, his quality of contact decreased.
That warrants a look at Machado’s swing and plate discipline. I will briefly describe what I was afraid to find.
Sometimes, a power hitter will feel the bat speed going and compensate by putting more effort into the swing. That means more guesswork, and selling power instead of measuring power and contact with the direction of the plates. You’ll see the home run total stay the same for a few years, but the OBP will slowly drop, until it can no longer compensate, and suddenly you have 2010s Albert Pujols.
Old Manny and the Sea
| The season | BatSpd | FastSw% | HardHit% | Swing% | Z-Swing% | Z-Contact% | pull % | EV90 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 76.7 | 66.6% | 45.9% | 29.3% | 69.5% | 85.3% | 38.4% | 107.6 |
| 2024 | 75.2 | 52.6% | 48.8% | 29.7% | 72.4% | 85.5% | 37.4% | 107.7 |
| 2025 | 74.5 | 43.0% | 51.5% | 29.8% | 70.0% | 83.3% | 37.6% | 107.7 |
| 2026 | 74.4 | 40.7% | 42.3% | 31.1% | 68.8% | 83.8% | 42.9% | 105.9 |
I see no strong evidence that that is happening here. Machado has lost his bat speed mark and a few points in Z-Contact% since 2023, but he was a quick bat during that time and is still above average. Also, the man is 33 years old and coming up on his 2,000th major league game – I think it’s fair to expect his physical abilities to slip a bit without raising too many alarms.
Machado is chasing a little more this year, but we’re talking about a single-digit number of swings throughout the season. That could be explained by any number of factors, especially if he is clearly frustrated with his performance. In any case, he continues to skate like he did last year, which was really good.
There are two numbers that give me concern, and I’ll admit up front that I don’t know how these two numbers alone would affect Machado’s season. We have entered the realm of educated guesses.
Compared to the previous three seasons, Machado is allowing the ball to travel deeper into the strike zone before cutting it: nearly four inches deeper than in 2024-25, and six inches deeper than in 2023. Is that the result of a decrease in bat speed? Maybe to some extent, but he also stands three or four inches deeper in the box than he did three years ago. His posture, which had been very open, closed by a few degrees.
At the same time, he pulls the ball more – and even pulls the ball more in the air – than any of the three campaigns above. He also lost about two miles per hour for the EV90.
Does Machado go in the bucket? That’s hard to pin down from season to season on TV. The camera angle for center field at Petco Park isn’t that great, and Machado will sometimes deliberately open his hips early to move to the infield.
Another number that bothers me is Machado’s swing rate on pitches in the middle of the strike zone.
I think I repeatedly failed the math section with the Y-axis scale here, but the decline is real. Most of the time in San Diego, Machado swung at about 80% of pitches in the heart of the strike zone. This year, that’s down to 72.6%, which is significant no matter how you format the graph. Pitches in this zone are not easy to hit, but they always hit if you don’t swing. And taking too many strikes is bad for a hitter, for reasons you don’t need a math background to explain.
I don’t know exactly what is going on with Machado. Between the new batting position and the reduced swing rate in the heart area, I wonder if Machado isn’t seeing the ball the way he used to. Maybe you need glasses. The fact that Fernando Tatis Jr. famously didn’t make it until May 30 makes me wonder if there’s a metaphysical malaise in the Padres’ clubhouse. Is there a golem? Do they all have mono or something?
I sympathize with Machado’s frustration, and agree that more data may not be the answer. But something has to change. See an eye doctor. Get an exorcism. Wash your hands. This cannot go on forever.
